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What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Fri May 03, 2013 12:44 pm

If we're gonna kick around a search engine, well it should be one that had the world on a string. And basically failed.

Anyone know the whole nasty story? Seriously.

Yahoo was the first Internet site I ever saw. 1995. Then people got rich! Then they lost it.

They got "Scroogled," according to a Microsoft advertisement.

And no fighting in this topic. Or I send you home with a note!

rjm

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Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Fri May 03, 2013 8:35 pm

Google made a better search engine.

I mean, just look at how popular Google is on this forum. People bring up the name constantly.

Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Fri May 03, 2013 10:00 pm

drjohncarpenter wrote:Google made a better search engine.

I mean, just look at how popular Google is on this forum. People bring up the name constantly.

Wow MY boy must be the most popular Elvis song ever and santa claus belts are his most popular stage attire , Just look how often those two get mentioned on here .

Alan.

Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Sat May 04, 2013 1:22 am

Chad Gates wrote:

drjohncarpenter wrote:Google made a better search engine.

I mean, just look at how popular Google is on this forum. People bring up the name constantly.

Wow MY boy must be the most popular Elvis song ever and santa claus belts are his most popular stage attire , Just look how often those two get mentioned on here :D .

Alan.

I know ... you just did it again.

Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Sat May 04, 2013 2:04 am

Back on topic.

Why did another weirdly named search engine drive them out of the game?

1. Google has maintained a simple interface. Yahoo! got so "busy" with everything on the page. They wanted to be all things to all people. News was a major feature, but they seemed to lose that focus.

2. Google understood the changes to the Internet better. And so the array of apps available are wonderful, but not intrusive.

3. Google bought YouTube.

4. Google was perhaps far more aggressive in terms of marketing and advertising. The Maps/earth feature keeps track of everyone and everything. This is useful to many for a variety of reasons, and scary as well, but advertisers LOVE IT!

5. Google developed the mobile "Android" operating system. Bingo.

Now. Why wasn't Yahoo! ahead of the game in all these areas? I see no reason why they dropped the ball! So, that's what I want to know. They had quite a head start! And were blown out of the water on all fronts described above.

Curious!

rjm

Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Sat May 04, 2013 11:30 am

rjm wrote:Back on topic.

Why did another weirdly named search engine drive them out of the game?

1. Google has maintained a simple interface. Yahoo! got so "busy" with everything on the page. They wanted to be all things to all people. News was a major feature, but they seemed to lose that focus.

2. Google understood the changes to the Internet better. And so the array of apps available are wonderful, but not intrusive.

3. Google bought YouTube.

4. Google was perhaps far more aggressive in terms of marketing and advertising. The Maps/earth feature keeps track of everyone and everything. This is useful to many for a variety of reasons, and scary as well, but advertisers LOVE IT!

5. Google developed the mobile "Android" operating system. Bingo.

Now. Why wasn't Yahoo! ahead of the game in all these areas? I see no reason why they dropped the ball! So, that's what I want to know. They had quite a head start! And were blown out of the water on all fronts described above.

Curious!

rjm

That's easy... Because "The Doc" chose Google.

Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Sat May 04, 2013 3:29 pm

Well, Yahoo has had a few goof ups in their selection of dodgy CEOs as of late. Their latest mishap, Scott Thompson, lied on his resume` about having a degree in something he didn't have a degree in. He was promptly dismissed.

Thankfully, Yahoo! now has former Googler, Marissa Mayer, heading its company as one of the top talents in the industry when it comes to leadership. I think we will see a big turnaround from Marissa Mayer if she has anything to say about it.

Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Sat May 04, 2013 7:21 pm

drjohncarpenter wrote:Google made a better search engine.

I mean, just look at how popular Google is on this forum. People bring up the name constantly.

As I explained just recently, on a thread that has vanished now, the expressions 'Google' and 'Googling' are often used to refer to any search engine use.

Rather like 'Hoovering' has come to mean vacuum cleaning using any make of vacuum cleaner...

Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Sat May 04, 2013 11:36 pm

BrianTCB wrote:Well, Yahoo has had a few goof ups in their selection of dodgy CEOs as of late. Their latest mishap, Scott Thompson, lied on his resume` about having a degree in something he didn't have a degree in. He was promptly dismissed.

Thankfully, Yahoo! now has former Googler, Marissa Mayer, heading its company as one of the top talents in the industry when it comes to leadership. I think we will see a big turnaround from Marissa Mayer if she has anything to say about it.

Well, I still use Yahoo! mail as my default email, and they just added Dropbox integration to the web client (but not to the apps, just yet), and this is quite a bonus for me, as I use it as my primary cloud. Dropbox is getting big, and Yahoo! got on board, so I hope you are right. They have a lot to offer, particularly in mail/calendar/contacts. The contacts sync so flawlessly!

Whereas Google has a 'bot that reads your mail, to "anticipate your needs." Which is definitely more than I "need"!

So, we'll see where it goes.

rjm (In the States, we don't say "hoovering," but all brands of tissues are generally referred to as "Kleenexes.")

Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Scott Thompson, now the former CEO of YahooNEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson is out after it was found he padded his resume with an embellished college degree, ending his term at the company after just four months.

Kinda funny, and sad, since we were just talking about "Albert the Person" doing the same thing (worse, actually), and getting away with it, scott-free!

rjm

Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Sun May 05, 2013 6:17 am

rjm wrote:Back on topic.

Why did another weirdly named search engine drive them out of the game?

My first post succinctly and directly addressed your query.

drjohncarpenter wrote:Google made a better search engine.

Did you miss it?

Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Sun May 05, 2013 9:03 am

drjohncarpenter wrote:

rjm wrote:Back on topic.

Why did another weirdly named search engine drive them out of the game?

My first post succinctly and directly addressed your query.

drjohncarpenter wrote:Google made a better search engine.

Did you miss it?

No, I saw it. And it's true. I just thought it a little interesting in the details. That's all.

rjm

Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Sun May 05, 2013 10:39 am

A better product brought more users to the site, which drove traffic up, which increased revenue, which allowed the company to expand on various projects, ideas and acquisitions. I only wish I had invested back in 1998.

Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Sun May 05, 2013 10:56 am

drjohncarpenter wrote:A better product brought more users to the site, which drove traffic up, which increased revenue, which allowed the company to expand on various projects, ideas and acquisitions. I only wish I had invested back in 1998.

Now, THAT'S detail!

1998. They go quite aways back, which has to be. Who knew? It's like that film: "Frequency." Except that he told his little brother the wrong search engine! LOL!

Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Google understood the need for people to find information in a simple way and do it well.

Google created new ways of searching, and the algorithms they used retrieved better quality of information and delivered better quality of information to the user

Google understood the need for a search engine to be a search engine visually and to appear if that is all it does. So the simple interface worked. And with the simple interface it meant speed of loading was also an advantage in a era of low internet speeds.

Yahoo on the other hand tried to be everything, visually cluttered, it diluted its message and many no longer saw it as being a search engine but a portal for many other things, even though portals were in their infancy it basically changed its function. Search was no longer a priority and its algorithms were far less developed. Yahoo saw a future one way and Google another. Google won...at least for the moment

Of course Google now do many things but its appearance has changed little. It still appears to be a search engine...Google collates information and organises it better than any other search engine. Its other products are also designed to retrieve more information from the user, they knew this, they chose this direction, knowledge is power. Until someone else creates a better way or a new way of collating information then Google will be dominant for years to come

Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Thu May 09, 2013 9:02 pm

Mephisto, you said something I didn't know: they actually used different algorithms for searching. This means they either coded it from scratch, or took apart existing engines (re-engineering), and found problems and deficiencies. I would love to read a book about this process; sounds fascinating! Everyone sort of assumed that they all did pretty much the same thing, with some making more use of 'bots to auto-gather the information as time went on. (In the early days, with Yahoo, you actually submitted your URL manually, and it took a few days to show up.)

Thanks!

rjm

Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Fri May 10, 2013 4:34 pm

rjm wrote:Mephisto, you said something I didn't know: they actually used different algorithms for searching. This means they either coded it from scratch, or took apart existing engines (re-engineering), and found problems and deficiencies. I would love to read a book about this process; sounds fascinating! Everyone sort of assumed that they all did pretty much the same thing, with some making more use of 'bots to auto-gather the information as time went on. (In the early days, with Yahoo, you actually submitted your URL manually, and it took a few days to show up.)

Thanks!

rjm

Gathering the information is easy, even I could do that within 6 months of being a developer, Organising the information so that it matches what a user wants is not. Even the simplest of matching requires a lot of work. You have to deal with numerous languages, words spelled the same but mean different things and different words that mean the same thing, also context of how the word is used, context of a specific page that could have a number of topics within it, misspellings in every language, keyword density, and of course many people trying to subvert the search engine to get to the top of the search results.

There have been a number of things that have sped up the delivery of information to the search engine, blogs, rss feeds, sitemaps, faster bots and new an faster technology to identify newly changed content. It used to take 6 months to get your site indexed when I first started 12 years ago! Google Analytics has been used by them to identify any information that has been updated, they can see changes in the volume of people going to a site or a page and can therefore determine how popular it is as well. Their knowledge is immense.

Im not sure if there are any books about Google search specifically, I dont read much outside the internet, guess that makes me a geek

Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Fri May 10, 2013 6:52 pm

Google kept it simple and continue to do so. How many sites fall foul of the 'two clicks' rule?

Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Fri May 10, 2013 7:06 pm

I'm not sure this is the best place to post this but I didnt want to open another thread. Does anyone know what these terms mean?

PA-DA of 30 or over10 or less external links (OBL) from homepage

It is related to Google Page Rank and SEO

Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Sat May 11, 2013 4:06 am

Delboy wrote:Google kept it simple and continue to do so. How many sites fall foul of the 'two clicks' rule?

Perhaps an answer to your question might help answer the more difficult one.

What, precisely, is that rule? It rings a bell, but that's all. (I would guess it means not to layer your site too deeply.)

Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Thank you. I did not know that it is really Bing search! Sometimes, Bing is SO completely whack. (The maps are hideous. And On Star uses Bing, and it can never find anything!)

Hmmmm. Yahoo also owns what used to be Alta Vista, and they were so ahead of the game, back in the day. Alta Vista was the "serious" search engine. And served as a first web archive for Usenet. I wonder what happened to those coders?

Fascinating. Thanks again!

rjm

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Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Sun May 12, 2013 2:25 pm

Francesc wrote:I'm not sure this is the best place to post this but I didnt want to open another thread. Does anyone know what these terms mean?

PA-DA of 30 or over10 or less external links (OBL) from homepage

It is related to Google Page Rank and SEO

Page Authority and Domain Authority, used by Seomoz to calculate a ranking of a specific page or domain, its an alternative measurement to Google's pagerank, you have very little chance of influencing these figures...pagerank is easier to influence. 30 or more is a decent level but it is a logarithmic scale like pagerank so 40 is 10 times 30 and 50 is 100 times 30 etc

It is generally not a good idea to have too many external links on the home page (or indeed on any page) unless you have either reciprocal links or if the page is something many people would link to.

Re: What happened to Yahoo! (?)

Sun May 12, 2013 3:02 pm

rjm wrote:

Delboy wrote:Google kept it simple and continue to do so. How many sites fall foul of the 'two clicks' rule?

Perhaps an answer to your question might help answer the more difficult one.

What, precisely, is that rule? It rings a bell, but that's all. (I would guess it means not to layer your site too deeply.)

rjm

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I317 using Tapatalk 2

There are only so many things you can do with 2 clicks, so the rule isnt exactly all encompassing. A more generic rule is to minimise the number of clicks that enable the user to get to a goal. At the same point you still have to type something so keyboard clicks are still clicks!